A vehicle bus, such as a Controller Area Network (CAN) bus, provides a means of communication between various computing systems, aspects of one or more computing systems, sensor, actuators, and/or the like relied on by contemporary vehicles of various types. As the number of such elements in contemporary vehicles has proliferated over the years, establishing individual communication links between these elements has become costly, burdensome, and impractical. Large wiring harnesses and enormous lengths of wiring leading every which way throughout a vehicle are required. A bus-based approach, however, allows many elements to transmit and receive data over a single physical transmission medium, removing the cost and the cumbersome considerations involved in providing separate wiring between elements.
Nevertheless, as the number and uses of control-system elements have continued to proliferate, the demands on a given vehicle bus have also increased, making the capacity of a vehicle bus an issue of increasing significance. Although a stressed vehicle bus typically does not result in communication data between vehicle elements being dropped, insufficient capacity can often result in delayed delivery of the data, particularly for data not considered to have a high priority, such as the high priority associated with data used in control systems deemed to have implications for safety. Because of the time sensitive nature usually associated with the various types of data communicated on the vehicle bus, delay can result in significant problems and can even preclude certain applications.